The marriage contract lay between them like a death sentence, ink still wet, sealing fates neither had chosen. Lord Dominic Ashford, the war wolf of Waterloo, stared at the trembling girl across his study with eyes cold as winter frost. She was his enemy's daughter, the spawn of the man who had betrayed his brother to a French firing squad. Every fiber of his being screamed for vengeance. Yet honor and his dying father's wishes had bound him to this unholy union.
He had sworn an oath that morning, standing before her pale, frightened face. He would give her his name, his protection, his roof, but never his heart, never his attention, never a single word more than necessity demanded. He would make her a ghost in his own house, invisible, irrelevant, forgotten. It was the cruelest punishment he could devise without breaking his vow. But as she lifted her eyes, those impossibly green eyes swimming with unshed tears, and whispered words that would haunt him for weeks to come, Dominic felt the first crack in his carefully constructed armor.
"I understand, my lord," she had said softly. "You need not pretend I exist. I am quite accustomed to being no one at all." The rain fell like punishment upon Ashford Hall, turning the gravel drive to rivers of gray sorrow. Inside, the servants moved like wraiths through corridors that had known no laughter since the war, their footsteps muffled by Persian carpets now faded with neglect. At the center of this cold grandeur sat Lord Dominic Ashford, watching the flames devour another log in the library hearth, whiskey glass forgotten in his scarred hand.
He had returned from the continent with a limp, a reputation for ruthlessness, and a hatred so pure it had sustained him through three years of hunting the traitor who sold English positions to Napoleon. That traitor, Lord Edmund Hartley, had died in his bed before Dominic could exact justice. But Hartley had left behind something Dominic could punish: a daughter. Lady Genevieve Hartley, 19 years old, orphaned, penniless, and now his wife by arrangement of their fathers before the war, a contract neither could break without scandal that would destroy both family names.
Dominic's father, on his deathbed, had begged his son to honor the agreement. And so, with a heart full of venom and a soul carved hollow by loss, Dominic had wed the enemy's child that very morning, in a ceremony barren of warmth or witnesses. She sat now in the east wing, exactly where he'd ordered her kept, far from his sight, far from his thoughts, or so he desperately hoped.